5 - 11 April 2001
Issue No.528
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 April 2001 Issue No.528 |
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One step forward
It has been a slog to get even this far, but Sunday's arrest of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic may not be enough, writes Gamal Nkrumah
Judged by every conventional yardstick of post Cold War politics, last week's arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic should have surprised no one. Issuing a deadline for the end of March, Washington had threatened to cut off a promised aid package to Yugoslavia worth $100 million unless Belgrade indicted Milosevic for war crimes. But although Yugoslavia's Serb president, Vojislav Kostunica, reluctantly arrested his presidential predecessor, he stopped shy of extraditing Milosevic to face war crime charges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, firmly stating that that would break Yugoslavia's constitution. The gesture is purely symbolic. It is also well short of what Washington wants. Though for now the United States has withdrawn its threat to cut aid, Kostunica may yet suffer further pressure from an irate US administration.
Yugoslavia was forced into making a symbolic gesture to win the West's stamp of approval. Officially, the Yugoslav authorities have charged Milosevic with several serious crimes, including smuggling 173 kilograms of gold worth $1.1 billion to Switzerland, and hoarding the proceeds in secret bank accounts in Greece and Cyprus. Milosevic claims that the money was used to finance Serb militias in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and insists that the transfer of funds to Serb militias were "state secrets". Milosevic is also charged with the attempted assassination of Vuk Darkovic in 1999, a pro-Western opposition figure who waged a ferocious political campaign against Milosevic. He is similarly charged with abducting former President Ivan Stambolic last year. Times, and loyalties, change: Milosevic started his career as Stambolic's protégé. Also indicted along with Milosevic were his customs chief Mikhail Kertes and secret police chief Rade Markovic. Milosevic's daughter, Maria, was also arrested for the obstruction of justice because she tried to prevent police from arresting her father on Saturday and fired at them. The list of charges is long, and undistinguished. But crucially, war crimes are not among them.
Western Europe's leaders, at least, are pleased. "Yugoslavia has taken another important step towards modern Europe," said Romano Prodi, the European Commission President. French President, Jacques Chirac, was reportedly "overjoyed." "A man who is among those who initiated long-term evil in the Balkans will have to take responsibility for his actions," chimed in President Milan Kucan of Slovenia, a breakaway republic of the former federal Yugoslavia.
photo: ReutersBut the US is far from satisfied. Charges of corruption and abuse of power are vague. And there is little concrete evidence of Milosevic's involvement in specific cases. It will be hard for any charge to stick. But Washington's biggest desire, Milosevic's trial for war crimes committed in Kosovo, remains unsated. "Milosevic's arrest should be the first step toward trying him for the crimes against humanity with which he is charged," warned US President George Bush. But nationalists, who include the country's current president, Vojislav Kostunica, are reluctant to hand Milosevic over to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. The US, for its part, has shown its willingness to intervene by offering a $5 million reward to anyone who delivers Milosevic to the War Crimes Tribunal.
Washington's eagerness to indict Milosevic has many causes, but the US is disingenuous in suggesting it is upset only with Milosevic's record on human rights. In part, he is tackled merely because he is a soft target. Milosevic is no more beastly than Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Chile's former military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Uganda's Idi Amin or Chad's Hussein Habre. But he now appears a paper tiger. He lost four wars in quick succession and has been substantially declawed. The world is full of bloodthirsty and power-hungry totalitarian dictators. But few are as vulnerable as Milosevic is now.
Washington has other reasons to despise the fallen autocrat. Milosevic posed as the champion of Socialism in the turbulent post-Communist eastern Europe. He gave sinecures to committed Marxists like his own wife Mirjana Markovic, who leads the Yugoslav United Left Party. He established especially close ties with the People's Republic of China. His predilection for maintaining ties with countries that Washington brands "rogue nations" and organisations declared "terrorist" by successive US administrations did not help him either. Nor did his links to shady organisations in neighbouring Greece, a country which served as the chief entry and exit port for Serbian goods and needs, pass unnoticed in Washington.
The Yugoslav authorities are walking a tight-rope. They hope not to offend Washington, but fear pushing Milosevic's supporters too far. Those supporters are still potent enough to make the fledgling democratic government tread with care. In any case, the Kostunica administration itself includes some of Milosevic's old allies. General Nebojsa Pavkovic, Milosevic's army chief, now works for President Kostunica. In January, President Kostunica nervously put Milosevic under 24 hour surveillance, but excused the move by saying it was for Milosevic's own protection. Even the arrest itself was a reminder of Milosevic's latent domestic strength and the government's difficult position. Serb officers "systematically prevented the authorities from performing their duties by giving open support to armed civilians and Milosevic's personal security" during the arrest, a government statement said after Milosevic was charged on Sunday. Growing alarm at the potential for unrest provoked by the charges also led the Belgrade authorities to call upon all civilians, presumably meaning Milosevic supporters, to surrender arms to the police.
Milosevic's record is dire. But he is to be censured for using Yugoslavia's ethnic discontent to further his ambitions, rather than causing it in the first place. Yugoslavia, a conglomerate of rival religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, has always teetered precariously on the brink of disintegration. The painful transition to capitalist development, the collapse of the command economy and the ruin of a once thriving tourism industry have led to a fierce scramble for fast dwindling resources by rival ethnic groups. Milosevic, to his shame, encouraged these ethnic tensions and gleefully nurtured the most vicious of Serbia's nationalists. This acted as a catalyst for the country's underlying problems. The president of the former Yugoslav republic, Josip Tito, held the country together by downplaying ethnic and religious differences and giving each group a share of the national cake. But once those tensions erupted, Milosevic was unable to maintain Tito's legacy and he was forced to side with one ethnic group.
Tito was a builder, Milosevic had to act the demolition man. Internationally, Tito cleverly played one superpower against the other and banded with like-minded nationalists and socialists in Africa and Asia to form the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Yugoslavia was the first, and for over a decade the only, European nation to do so. Belgrade identified completely with the newly independent developing world at the first NAM summit in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955.
Under Milosevic, Yugoslavia's mantra changed dramatically. Tito's NAM was relegated to an irrelevant aside. The Roman Catholic Slovenes and Croats were now cast as the enemies of the Orthodox Serbs. Roman Catholics were contemptible Western lackeys, Muslims were outlandish barbarians. His achievement was a climate of intolerance, chauvinism and bigotry towards Muslims and Albanians. Unsurprisingly, those who could, fled.
Slovenia, Croatia and Orthodox Macedonia unilaterally broke from Belgrade in the early 1990s. Their secession encouraged the Muslims of Bosnia. Milosevic responded. He galvanised the by now dispirited Serb diaspora in the former Yugoslavia and they rallied readily. Milosevic unleashed Serb militias who brutally terrorised the inhabitants of Kosovo and Serb-controlled regions of Bosnia. The international community was outraged and the United Nations sanctioned Yugoslavia in 1992. Milosevic's old foe, the US, brokered (some would say dictated) a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio in 1995, bringing the conflict to an uneasy but abrupt end. But by the time the guns had stopped, over 200,000 lay dead.
The Dayton Accord, however, failed to address the structural problems in Yugoslavia. In 1998, fighting erupted in Kosovo and in the spring of 1999 Milosevic launched a bloody offensive against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. He only halted when NATO forcibly redrew the map of the Balkans.
Milosevic, with his eagerness to solve his policy problems through bloodshed has the look of a man from an older, less humane era: a ghost haunting the brave new world of international law and the universal declaration of human rights. But he is, in some ways, a symptom of the travails that have tormented Yugoslavia. He constantly needed to reinvent himself to appease the country's various interest groups. The son of a defrocked Orthodox priest from Montenegro, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia when he was 18 and quickly rose through the ranks. He became Serbian president in 1989 by painting himself as the saviour of Serb national dignity, after the death of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia's founding father. Milosevic liked to present himself as one of the inner circle of dedicated anti-imperialist revolutionaries in the mould of Lenin's celebrated One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. But others saw him as the last of a dying breed who had no compunction in stoking the basest nationalist sentiments to win support.
Milosevic's opportunism soon became plain. In power, he watered down Tito's Marxism and changed the League of Communists of Serbia into the Socialist Party of Serbia. He happily did business with capitalists and siphoned funds abroad. At heart Milosevic was never the leftist revolutionary he professed, but an unscrupulous, cunning politician. After two terms as president of Serbia, Milosevic was constitutionally barred from serving a third term in office. But he retained power because the Federal Yugoslav Parliament elected him President of Yugoslavia. This infuriated Washington, which hoped to be rid of him without further ado.
Finally, Washington has grandly decided to charge Slobodan Milosevic, scarcely consulting the current Yugoslav administration. Milosevic's efforts to cultivate close friendships with the likes of former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger and financier David Rockefeller have been in vain. The Serbian strongman's policies have hurt Serbia's economy, and his affronts to Western powers have been deemed unforgivably adventurous. Milosevic had to be taught a lesson. Anything else, Western powers say, would betray those Yugoslav people who took to the streets against him. But for all his record, he still has powerful friends. President Kostunica's half measure may appease a vengeful US, without excessively enraging Milosevic's Serb supporters. Or it may incur the wrath of both. In that case Kostunica's rickety 18-party coalition, trapped between the two, may not survive the ordeal.
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